We describe the development, operation, and application of the 4D Camera -- a 576 by 576 pixel active pixel sensor for scanning/transmission electron microscopy which operates at 87,000 Hz. The detector generates data at approximately 480 Gbit/s which is captured by dedicated receiver computers with a parallelized software infrastructure that has been implemented to process the resulting 10 - 700 Gigabyte-sized raw datasets. The back illuminated detector provides the ability to detect single electron events at accelerating voltages from 30 - 300 keV. Through electron counting, the resulting sparse data sets are reduced in size by 10 - 300x compared to the raw data, and open-source sparsity-based processing algorithms offer rapid data analysis. The high frame rate allows for large and complex 4D-STEM experiments to be accomplished with typical STEM scanning parameters.
@article{arxiv.2305.11961,
title = {The 4D Camera: an 87 kHz direct electron detector for scanning/transmission electron microscopy},
author = {Peter Ercius and Ian J. Johnson and Philipp Pelz and Benjamin H. Savitzky and Lauren Hughes and Hamish G. Brown and Steven E. Zeltmann and Shang-Lin Hsu and Cassio C. S. Pedroso and Bruce E. Cohen and Ramamoorthy Ramesh and David Paul and John M. Joseph and Thorsten Stezelberger and Cory Czarnik and Matthew Lent and Erin Fong and Jim Ciston and Mary C. Scott and Colin Ophus and Andrew M. Minor and and Peter Denes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.11961},
year = {2024}
}